I definitely don’t understand a lot of the science involved, so you may be right about Pielke and Lindzen. their’s sound like valid positions to me, even if I disagree with them. I guess my point is that they DO publish in peer reviewed science, so that their positions can be critically reviewed, and that that process “moves the science forward”. Certainly their views are used by ACC opponents to fuel confusion and distrust. Looking forward to your take on this.

Pielke is actually quite interesting to me, because he considers himself to be a radical leftist, and I am very familiar with leftist ideology. yet, I think he makes some terribly flawed assumptions about motivations and the role of science, that I think are inconsistent with his stated beliefs.

Excellent Blog, and I appreciate the way that you respond to the different posts, and try to engage them substantively.
i have a miniscule background in Astrophysics and evolutionary biology, but have spent much of the last 10 years studying how people develop mental schemas, world-views, and how they self identify, including political ideology.
I think that what we are seeing with both the “denialist” attacks on ACC and specifically with the hacked emails has a variety of consequences and flows from a few different sources.
I have followed ClimateAudit and a few other denialist sites, as well as Realclimate, skepticalScience and other proponents of ACC. I have also read a few hundred of the most damning emails and comments on them by advocates on both sides.

First off, in theory, I am sympathetic to the denialist premise – that there are often structural limitations and inadequate exploration of alternative factors in the current ways that modern science is conducted. I personally think that our understanding of intelligence and human nature suffers from these problems. I also think that the attacks on ACC from various sources and the PR campaign against it have actually made the science around climate change much more extensive and careful. if there had not been opposition to the theory of CO2 buildup causing potentially catastrophic change the science might have made more mistakes that would not have been discovered and the rigor of the science would definitely not be nearly as sophisticated and comprehensive as it is. On a personal level the last few months have led me to realize just how incredibly complicated the subject is. Climate science and certain biological sciences are clearly becoming very horizontally integrated over diverse disciplines, so it is hard for any one person or group of people to understand the full range involved in any theory.

That said, it is also pretty clear to me that the attacks on ACC are largely coming from an ideological source and not a scientific one. All the scientists I see who dispute ACC have an apriori objection to the theory and are looking for ways to show that it is wrong. One frame of reference is a libertarian contrarian perspective that has the rogue non-comformist who is willing to challenge the status quo and show up the elite inbred scientists that are unwilling or unable to look at the truth and just accept the gospel of entrenched scientific opinion. I see Richard lintzen as falling in this vague camp. Then there are the engineer/geologists who are from a conservative mainstream culture that is leery of any government intrusion on freedom, and see ACC as an excuse for governmental or socialist creeping takeover of our way of life. Pat Michaels and Steve McIntyre and extremists like Ian Plimer fall into this general group. The reality is of course more complicated.

I also think there is also an ideological perspective from proponents of ACC that is generally liberal and environmentally oriented and concerned about the possible consequences of ACC.
In this particular case, I think the ideology of those opposed to ACC, which under normal circumstances might not be a terrible problem, in fact, so distorts the reasoning of those involved that it ends up being extremely destructive, and leads to the contradiction that you point to in your original post. Openness in this case can have serious negative consequences. For one thing the various attacks on ACC are in many cases mutually exclusive. So that the proponents of the various arguments should rationally be just as opposed to each others hypothesis as to the theory of ACC. But that does not really happen. Basically anyone’s proposal that is against ACC is part of the club and there is almost no attempt at making a consistent theory from those opposed or excluding hypothesis and their proponents that have clearly been proven completely untenable (i.e.Plimer).
On top of this there is an extremely aggressive right wing political movement in the US that is using climate change science as one tool to demonize liberals and democrats as being part of this conspiracy to use government to undermine the American way of life. Because the science is so complicated it is not difficult to present very scientific sounding arguments that appear to completely invalidate ACC. I personally have encountered hundreds of people on right wing websites who are convinced that it has been absolutely proven that ACC is a hoax, but almost none have actually bothered to read anything other than the “science” from anti climate change sites. This of ocurse is a dangerous tredn n it’s own, as people are able to appear to have an abundance of information that bolsters their ideology, without any interest in checking the validity form sources outside their ideological framework. This also happens with the left in the US as well, but I think to a smaller degree.

As I said, I have read a few hundred of the CRU emails and the commentaries and am surprised at how intelligent people have been able to twist them in ways that allowed right wing bloggers to totally distort them into something they weren’t. After reading the explanation of “hide the decline”, I am surprised that even McIntyre continues to profess that it is something nefarious. Though with him and some others on both sides the situation has become so personal that I can see it would be hard to let go of any opportunity to criticize their opponents. But the right wing bogosphere has created a whole myth filled with outright lies and wholesale exaggerations to support the idea of a huge scientific hoax.

This has led to a polarization between proponents and critics of ACC, and has led to the situation that you are describing where having full disclosure is not in the interests of scientist engaged in the heart of the research on this issue. This has in fact led to an almost total politicization of the issue.

The downside to this is that policy decisions based on science are almost impossible on a national level in the US, and the media has and will continue to focus on the enmity and horse race of “is it or isn’t it true”. So much of the actual science is lost as well as the concrete actions and development of policy that are occurring in both the public and private sectors. This very possibly will lead to a much more serious problem in the future if little or no concerted action is taken in the near term.

On the positive side, there are intelligent people who are denialists and as has been pointed out McIntyre has made at least one if not more valuable contributions to correcting the science, and all the attention and focus on so many different aspects of the issue have made the science much more robust. All the controversy has made me learn much more about the issue, and the hacked emails, are likely going to have a positive effect on figuring out how to make rational judgements about how to archive and re evaluate data. I also see much more attention paid to policy and economics. There are valid “right wing” arguments regarding policy about taking a measured, i.e increasingly aggressive approach, rather than all out economic effort immediately. And policy is being more carefully thought by the academic establishment in conjunction with many industries.

Of course, in my view the positive effects could be MUCH more so without the distorting effects of ideology on either side. In this particular case (which has some similarities to the arguments against evolution), it would be very easy for genuine skeptics (and there are a few of them) to be attempting to HELP scientists understand the complexities of the issues, and correct mistakes, and help to inform the public and policy makers that the limits of knowledge do NOT mean that no action needs to be taken. I think that Scientists like Lintzen and Pielke, while I have serious disagreements with their positions, serve a valuable purpose and are actively moving the science forward.

I also think blogs such as this one, SkepticalScience and RealClimate play a valuable part.
unfortunately I think it is largely drowned out by the right wing extremists, and will continue to be so until there is some major event that undermines the political value of being basically anti-science. I would guess that the internet is about 4 to one in hype against ACC at the moment (just a wild guess), but I also think that the clearing of scientists of any major wrong doing, and the complete exoneration of any scientific fraud, will soon have an impact on that imbalance.

[Tony: thanks, very insightful comments. We (everyone!) don't spend anywhere near enough time differentiating the various voices in this discussion, and understanding where they are coming from. That said, I disagree with the argument that folks like Pielke and Lindzen are moving the science forward. I've now been to hundreds of talks by the scientists who *are* moving the science forward, and it looks completely different to anything Pielke and Lindzen are obsessing over. Am happy to discuss this further - I'll write more on this soon - Steve]

Doing science, participating in the ‘live science’ end of things, requires something a little different, to my taste, than just what you’re describing. Namely, the focus of your work, if it is natural science, has to be answering some question about nature. McIntyre, regardless of what is prior experience is, is simply not trying to understand nature and for this reason is not doing science. He’s generally upfront about this himself. Rather than understanding nature, he’s pursuing particular people and their methods. His questions are more in the vein of ‘Can Mann really have gotten the answers he did using the data he says in the way he says?’ That’s not a question of science. The scientific questions would be things like “What have global temperatures done over the last 1000 years?”, “Are tree rings reliable proxies for temperature?” (If not, under what conditions do they fail? Under what conditions might they remain usable?)

Uh, yeah, well, no. It would be more accurate to say that “Scientists correct other scientists.” Or even sometimes, “Scientists correct themselves.”

It’s not like a paper is sitting in it’s journal saying to itself, “You know, something just doesn’t feel quite right,” and poof, it corrects itself.

It takes people to see the mistakes and point them out. So to criticize people like McIntyre or Climate Audit for being anti-science deniers is ludicrous.

[Science isn't "papers"; science is a process. And, yes it is self-correcting: go read Thomas Kuhn. McIntyre is not a scientist, he's a retired mining engineer. You don't contribute to science by sitting on the sidelines throwing rocks at the bits that don't fit your political worldview. You participate in science by looking at *all* the sources of evidence, developing and testing theories that explain them, and publishing your results so that others can validate them. - Steve]